Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/290

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

ingly beautiful, so warm and palpitant and enticing, and withal so naïve that he could only pretend to resist her.

"Cleopatra pleading with Antony madly to throw a world away," he intoned jestingly. "Away, temptress! Avaunt!"

But he belied his words by drawing her into his arms with her laughing exultantly because her power to charm was still supreme when she chose to exert it. Yet when she could not charm him into a promise to give her more time from his business, she flew into a tantrum; then lapsed into quivering remorse.

"Oh, George! I do believe I'm the most unjust, unreasonable, ungrateful woman in the world," she confessed, weeping in despair over herself.

This was followed by a pitiful period in which Fay Judson tried to be the kind of wife that Eleanor Hickson was; but she couldn't keep it up. The cool-headed, warm-hearted, steady-nerved standing by required of a wife who would be a help-meet to George Judson, seasoned as he had been seasoned, doing what he was doing, had not been bred into Fay Judson—not yet.

"I'm too weak, George!" she confessed again. "I'm just a sybarite after all."

And there came a time when George no longer disputed this. He thought she was a sybarite,